Burp Kablooey

Burp Kablooey is the hottest new game for the ten and unders. Invented by a three-year-old, it definitely knows its intended audience. 

To play Burp Kablooey, you will need:

• One balloon per kablooey team
• One kablooey rag per kablooey team. A kablooey rag is any rag you have laying around your house. 
• A kablooey court. This is basically any area with room to move around in. A backyard, family room, gymnasium, or park will all work.

A kablooey team consists of two people, the burper and the kablooey-er. 

How to play:

The burper uses his/her feet to kick the balloon in the air. When they have successfully kicked the balloon with their feet, they call out, "Burp!"

The kablooeyer then tries to hit the balloon with the kablooey rag. If they are successful, they call out, "Kablooey!"

The burper may be standing, sitting, or laying down. They may lay on a couch or the ground. The kablooey rag may be damp or dry, but if you use a wet rag, be aware that when the kablooeyer hits the balloon, a very wet kablooey rag will spray water droplets everywhere.

Scoring:
The point is not to score, the point is to say "burp" and "kablooey". If you want to keep score you can, but it is not an essential part of the game.

A standard game of Burp Kablooey is played as doubles, with a burper and a kablooeyer, but you may also play singles Burp Kablooey. 

Multiple Burp Kablooey teams may occupy the same kablooey court at the same time; however, this could result in increased occurences of injury. 

And that is how you play Burp Kablooey, the hottest new game out there.

In the beginning

 Remember the good old days of nine months ago? You know, back when we were finding out about COVID, and we all went into lockdown or quarantine or whatever? And everyone was like, "Three weeks, guys." And Disney was putting out recipes for theme park food, and coloring pages, and whatever hotel it was shared its chocolate chip cookie recipe, and didn't some streaming company make shows available or something? Zoom was just graciously extending their free account time limit. And businesses were all, "We're all in this together, we're going to get through it." Yeah, those days. Remember them?

As weird as it is, I kind of miss those early pandemic days. I mean, it was all the chaos and confusion and uncertainty and a lot of the inside of our homes, but with coloring pages and delightful recipes. Now it's just the chaos and confusion and uncertainty and a lot of the inside of our homes.

In the end, I think it's probably a good thing. I think it means we have adapted to the situation. But, maybe once in a while, just on occasion, someone somewhere could send out a little bonus. Anyone?

And that's how it goes

Today I made the mistake of transferring gigabytes of files from one drive to another drive via a VPN. Which took approximately 4 and a half hours? And would have been fine, except for the fact that while they were transferring, file explorer was basically bogged down and not letting me do anything. And all of my work required accessing files through file explorer. As you can imagine, it made productivity not great. And last week, I was trying to access large files through a VPN, which was taking a couple to a few minutes to load each image, and I couldn't do my work without looking at the files. So, another not productive stretch.

Mostly, working from home has been good, and I really can't complain, because I'm working. And many people are not. But it is incredibly frustrating to not be able to do work while working, and to feel like I haven't put in my hours so I need to keep working until midnight to do a decent day's work. And I did find one or two things to try and work on, it just wasn't my best day.

But the files are transferred, and tomorrow is another day that will hopefully not involve moving large files across drives via VPN and things should go better. Fingers crossed. And may we all be dealing with such routine frustrations sooner than later.

Icebreakers

I have this quirk where I like to come up with fun, random, icebreakers or conversation disrupters, depending on the situation. It is always good to be prepared with questions that can get a bad conversation back on track. So far, here's my list, but I'm always looking for more:

• Which would be a better president, a cat or a dog? (can change up the animals)
• Which state would you vote out the Union if there were a "US States: Survivor"? (Admittedly I didn't come up with this one, but it's a good question)
• If you were asked to name a city, what would you name it? (could be a city or a street)
• Which vegetables match up with which high school stereotypical clique? 
• If you could create a holiday, what would it be, and how would you celebrate?
• If you could travel the world following some theme or system, what would it be? (Mine would be places with fun names to say, all the hells on earth, or places that aren't the place--like Paris, Texas)
• If this [fill in the blank here] was a book title, what would the plot be? (could also be a movie, etc.)

I admit that right now, it isn't a long list, but it is a very reusable list. And I'll come up with more. So if you are bored and need some fun, here you go.